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Ken Dowe
Ken Dowe was an American DJ who began his radio career as a high school deejay and worked in San Diego. He moved to Dallas in the early 1960s to work at KBOX then to Atlanta to WQXI. In 1963, Gordon McLendon brought Dowe back to Dallas, to KLIF 1190. Dowe served KLIF and McLendon in numerous capacities as Program Director, Operations Manager and National PD. He was the creator of DFW's FM station, KNUS. Dowe served as Executive Vice President of the McLendon Corporation. After a decade, he left Dallas for several years to head up Bernie Waterman's KTSA in San Antonio where he created KTFM. Dowe acquired his first radio station in Oklahoma City, KLTE, which became America's first "light rock" format. During the '80s, he owned and operated a small group of radio stations from San Jose to Shreveport before selling them a decade later. In 1993 Dowe returned to the Dallas-Fort Worth area as Chief Operating Officer of Service Broadcasting Corp., joining his long time friend, Hymen Childs. Links To Peel In one of the Academic Articles that Eric W. Rothenbuhler wrote, entitled Peel In America, he interviewed Ken Dowe about his memories of Peel: According to Ken Dowe’s memory he recruited Ravenscroft to be his co-host for a Saturday afternoon program on KLIF in 1965, after the Beatles broke and he recalled hearing him with his British accent on WRR. His memory may be tangled with reports he had read, though, because there is little evidence that Ravenscroft was on WRR often or long and no sense of how Dowe would have found him in Dallas. The usual story, as reported above, is that Ravenscroft called into Russ Knight’s show, probably sometime in 1964. However he was identified by KLIF, they used him as a British voice to lend authenticity to their talk about the Beatles. Dowe reports that the Saturday afternoon show he did with Ravenscroft was a successful teen-oriented show. They took musical requests and did regular public appearances as well, ‘signing autographs and hyping KLIF’s association with the world’s hottest new music British invasion’. Peel also remembers and reports at least one such public appearance, though he says it was with Russ Knight. Dowe reports they worked together a year and a half and he considered Ravenscroft a good friend during that time. Dowe described him as an intense guy, not the life of the party but he used the talents he had. In 1995 Ken Dowe made a video clip of himself reminding Peel about his days with KLIF, which was broadcast on Peel's This Is Your Life in January 1996. In the clip, Dowe suggested that Peel first got his pay packet at KLIF, to which Peel replied adamantly from the BBC studio that he never got paid there. In fact Peel admitted later on in interviews that his first paid job as a DJ was at KOMA in Oklahoma City. External Links * Great Deejays * Bloomberg Category:People